Introduced as a “fair use film” that parodies Batman, The Joker, and Lorne Michaels while telling the story of “an unconfident, closeted trans girl as she moves to Gotham City to make it big as a comedian,” Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker dealt with delays caused by legal challenges before finally seeing the light of day in April 2024. Then it landed on a bunch of year-end best film lists and it’s still in contention for an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award.
Now? Well, the film is refusing to leave the stage, gaining fans every day and touring around the U.S. while also being available via physical media options and streaming on MUBI.
Here’s why that matters and what this interview with writer/director/and star Vera Drew is about: this film that is as surprising, funny, and smart as it is a well-told personal story about fucked up relationships has resonated with a community under attack. Members of the trans and queer communities have felt seen and entertained by a piece of art with a trans woman at its center (and behind the camera). Splinter talked with Drew about what it has meant to see the impact of this film on people while also discussing her bold pushback on Hollywood’s sacred cows and cinematic conventions–all while showing a new generation of filmmakers that they can be creative and epic in the stories they tell without generative AI shortcuts. The interview with Drew below has been lightly edited for clarity, with Splinter‘s questions in bold and Vera Drew’s responses below them.
When you go into this, do you realize how challenging it’s going to be to tell the story using these pieces?
Honestly, it was the thing that made it really exciting for me – just the idea of taking super well-known IP and turning it into a really personal story and trying to find those commonalities. Even in the comics, it’s like you have to jump through hoops to relate to some of these characters just when you’re coming at it from my experiences as a trans woman.
I think it’s not even just being trans. I think a lot of the stories that are told with these characters are ones that are just… it’s just the same story over and over and over again. I think this challenge of taking these characters and sort of mythologizing my life with them was the exciting thing. Batman and Joker, specifically, are very mythological characters. Myth itself has such a place in coming-of-age stories. I treated it like I would be adapting the Iliad or something. [Laughs] But instead, it’s Batman.
Can you expand on that a little bit? The idea of myth having such a place in coming-of-age stories.
The concept of myth itself from the Joseph Campbell perspective is that it has very little to do with storytelling, it’s more so the understanding of self. I think about stuff, even just basic fairy tales as being these lessons and stuff that we’re imparting on kids, trying to return these characters to a place where they’re not just corporate IP fodder.
We’re told all the time that superheroes are our modern myths, and I just don’t really think that’s how they’re actually treated in the creative side of things.
Specifically with Joker, I tried to do a new take on the character beyond just from the representation standpoint and queering it, but returning it to this archetypal-trickster thing. It’s why in the movie, she can transcend time and space and stuff like that. It’s this idea of these characters being archetypes, beyond just, “Oh, remember this specific Joker movie?” or whatever.
On the personal experience level, I really did just relate to Todd Phillips’ Joker movie as a mentally ill trans woman, watching a movie where this character is just being denied healthcare, has a broken family system and all that stuff, and is living in this very dystopian version of society. That really resonated with me as a trans woman.
Say what you will about that movie, but that was the first time I had ever seen a movie do that with Batman characters before; really treat it like this political, dystopian thing. I wanted to take that, I think, a step further and relate it to my own, personal experience.
I’ve seen a lot of really powerful reactions to this film. What has that meant to you as someone who, I would imagine, at some point thought this might not see the light of day?
I didn’t know how to show up for it at first, to be honest. Because the movie’s introduction to the world was so clumsy and tripping over myself and our kin of instant notoriety as a banned film, and what I went through at TIFF with Warner Bros. and stuff. Not to sound dramatic, but it was, like, traumatic. Then, in that year and a half after where we were doing secret screenings, I did a little mini tour in Australia. That was my first experience meeting people who were watching the movie and having these really big reactions.
I remember being in Sydney the first time somebody came out to me after a screening. I just didn’t know how to show up for it. It just had never occurred to me that the movie could mean that much to somebody that they could have that kind of transformative experience. Admittedly, it was because I had made the movie for myself and my friends and thought the level of specificity that I had put into it, as it relates to my trans experience, my experience with relationships, and my mom and stuff… It just never really occurred to me that somebody could relate to it that much. I was just up my own ass because of how hard it was getting the movie out there. But it was very easy to instantly be grateful getting to witness that kind of reaction.
It’s just, what more could you want out of something super personal that you make this aggressively weird and hyper-specific and getting to see what it means to people, it’s just incredible. It means a lot to me that it has resonated with trans people, especially trans people that are younger than me. I thought while I was making it, if anything, it was going to be like other trans people in their 30s like I am but it’s been a lot younger. It’s been, I’d say 25 and below are the people that are really going nuts for this movie on this personal level. That’s meant a lot.
Just getting to see parents of trans people really respond to it. One of the first reactions I got to the movie was right after TIFF. A parent of a trans person came up to me and was like, “Thank you for making this because I understand how to talk to my daughter now.” I just got goosebumps saying that. It was kind of the start of me understanding what my mom went through with raising me and just what a trans parent goes through. That’s a big messy way of saying it’s just been this kind of beautiful source of connection and healing. I’m just so thankful that the movie resonates on that emotional of a level, while also still being super funny and irreverent. It feels like all of that happened on accident. I’m nothing but grateful for it.
With this film and the experience that you went through to get it to a larger audience, do you feel like there’s a sense that you have created a path for other filmmakers to be able to play in these IP sandboxes and comment on these things in ways that are legally able to come through? Do you feel like you’ve been able to blaze a trail with that?
Legally, I can’t say that it was my intent. [Laughs] But I can say, I think maybe, I’d be really curious to see if there is a new legal precedent that’s been set with this movie. It’s kind of unfortunate, in a way, while knocking on wood, that we never actually went to court with it because there’s no written legal precedent for it. The movie’s existence itself is something that, theoretically, in the future, an amateur filmmaker could point to, if they wanted to take some IP and apply fair use and parody to it.
I think the thing that I do think, just because I’ve seen it hands-on is there really is this mobilization that’s happening with the next generation of filmmakers who watched the movie who are like, “Oh, my God, I can tell a big, larger-than-life story,” instead of just, “I’ve got no money and a camera, so I’ll just make a traditional indie movie.” I think there’s this mobilization of up-and-coming filmmakers who are like, “I really want to play in big genre mythic spaces.” That’s been really cool to see. It’s something that I’ve really seen pop up just in places that I would have never thought.
You built this film with a lot of artists, a lot of collaborators. No real generative AI was used on this, right?
Correct, yes.
To me, the reason why what you did works is because it had, not just your soul, but also the soul of everybody who created this thing that at times looks like a living coloring book. The thing that scares me is that people will be sold on the idea of, “and you could do that in an hour with generative AI.” That’s the thing I hate.
Same. I think where AI is at right now, is in the way super pro AI people talk about it, on social media, specifically, as being like this shortcut in the creative process and treating the creative process less as an expression of the soul or an expression of the self and more like this modified problem we need to solve. To me, that has always been the struggle of art and commerce, especially coming from television where like, oh, my God, everybody is exploited. At every level of production, so many shortcuts are taken. The schedules are so much shorter than they should be.
The fact that we have this debate around AI right now, it’s the idea of sunlight being the best disinfectant. The fact that it’s this on the nose right now, that it’s literally like, “We could have computers make movies for us or human beings.” I think most people, the consumer, will want stuff made by humans.
